Colter’s Journey: The Tim Colter Westerns, Book 1

Leaving their Pennsylvania home to forge a new life in the untamed Oregon Territory of 1845, the Colter family is ambushed by a kill-crazy gang of cutthroats on the Oregon Trail. Fifteen-year-old Tim Colter manages to escape and hide - only to return and find his parents butchered, his sisters Nancy and Margaret missing, and one last killer waiting for his return. Forced to fight for his life, the young Colter embarks on a perilous journey across a lawless frontier, hoping to save his sisters and salvage the dream they lived for.

Riders of the Purple Sage

It's 1871 in the contented Mormon town of Cottonwoods, Utah, and Elder Tull wants to marry wealthy rancher Jane Withersteen so desperately that he's willing to use the water supply - the precious lifeblood of the land - to force her hand. But that was before a mysterious, lone gunman called Lassiter showed up...

Shane

Shane, the traveller and ex-gunfighter, a mysterious gunman who enters into the life of Joe Starrett and his family and carves a place for himself in their hearts. Although he tries to leave his gunslinging past behind, refusing to even carry a gun, he decides to fight Fletcher and Wilson, the town enemies, in order to save Joe Starrett’s farm.

Fighting Caravans: A Western Story

Clint Belmet's parents were killed in a Comanche raid when he was young, but that hasn't stopped him from taking a job leading freight caravans on the old Santa Fe Trail, from Saint Louis, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico - a route that goes right through Comanche territory. Here is the raw, primitive West of the early pioneers, great caravans of freighters rumbling across the deadly prairies, risking attack by Comanche.

Radigan: A Novel

When beautiful Angelina Foley presents Tom Radigan with a Spanish grant and claims ownership of his land, he realizes he's up against a cunning and deadly opportunist. Foley wants him off Vache Creek immediately, and with 3,000 head of cattle, an outfit of hardcase gunfighters, and winter coming on, she is unwilling to take no for an answer.

The Burning Hills: A Novel

Wounded, dehydrated, and escaping and violent feud with the men of Bob Sutton's ranch, Trace Jordan is near collapse when he descends from the heat of the desert into a cool, secluded canyon. He wakes to find a beautiful woman gently caring for his injuries. Maria Cristina and her family have also suffered at the hands of Sutton and his men. The experience has left her hostile and defiant. But Jordan sees another side of Maria, and the more time they spend together, the greater his concern for her safety becomes.

The Last Mountain Man

Matt Jensen, reared by legendary mountain hero Smoke, is the last of a proud breed. He will soon learn that dispensing justice with a gun is the only true way to execute righteous revenge in the Old West.

The Iron Marshal

He was a tough enforcer for a New York gang. But when young Tom Shanaghy made one too many enemies, he skipped town on a fast-moving freight. He landed in a small Kansas town that had big dreams, no name, and the need for an honest lawman. Tom figured that a knuckle-and-skull man from Five Points would be perfect for the job. He didn't know that a high-stakes cattle drive was headed his way and that leading it was a vindictive rancher bent on settling an old score.

The Virginian

He is the Virginian-the first fully realized cowboy hero in American literature, a near-mythic figure whose idealized image has profoundly influenced our national consciousness. This enduring work of fiction marks the birth of a legend that lives with us still.

Smoke Jensen, the Beginning

For the first time, an epic account of a boy born into a struggle for survival on the harsh and unforgiving American frontier, the story behind the legend of Smoke Jensen.... On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war.

Hard Country: A Novel

National best-selling author and New Mexico native Michael McGarrity takes listeners to the wild territory of the late 19th-century American Southwest for this epic tale. After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory - a job that will forever change his life.

The Son

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching examination of the bloody price of power, The Son is a gripping and utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American west with rare emotional acuity, even as it presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive.

Monte Walsh

A classic about the American West and the life and times of one tough cowboy, Monte Walsh. Partial to pretty women, gambling, and practical jokes, Monte doesn't have to look far to find trouble. Luckily for him, Monte's best friend, Chet, is always there to post bail or quickly get Monte out of town. As Monte grows older, though, and the West inevitably changes, he resists changing with it, and shows his dedication and loyalty to the cowboy way of life.

How the West Was Won

They came by river and by wagon train, braving the endless distances of the Great Plains and the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada. They were men like Linus Rawlings, a restless survivor of Indian country who’d headed east to see the ocean but left his heart - and his home - in the West. They were women like Lilith Prescott, a smart, spirited beauty who fled her family and fell for a gambling man in the midst of a frontier gold boom. These pioneering men and women sowed the seeds of a nation with their courage....

The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains

A strong, silent stranger rides into the lawless lands of the western frontier, battles horse thieves, deals with unyielding scoundrels, and wins the heart of a schoolmarm. Owen Wister's 1902 classic---the first great novel of the American West---is rich in moral drama and vernacular wit. His hero---like knights of old---lives by an enduring code of chivalry and is governed by quiet courage and a deep sense of honor.

The Eyes of Texas: Matt Jensen: The Last Mountain Man, Book 8

Shady Rest, Texas, has the dubious reputation for being the deadliest town in America. Getting yourself killed is as easy as blinking and twice as quick. Sure enough, Matt Jensen hasn't swallowed his whisky before the town's marshal is gunned down.

Man Hunter

Was it justice... or revenge? What drove a simple farmer to set out on an impossible quest after a gang of bloodthirsty killers that raped and murdered his wife and slit his small son's throat? Their trail led him halfway across the country and deep into Mexico. One by one he tracked them down and brought them to justice, sometimes at the end of a short rope, more often in front of his fast guns, and he didn't care which.

Comstock Lode

It was just a godforsaken mountainside, but no place on earth was richer in silver. For a bustling, enterprising America, this was the great bonanza. The dreamers, the restless, the builders, the vultures - they were lured by the glittering promise of instant riches and survived the brutal hardships of a mining camp to raise a legendary boom town. But some sought more than wealth. There was Val Trevallion, a loner haunted by a violent past, and Grita Redaway, a radiantly beautiful actress driven by an unfulfilled need.

Dead Man's Walk

In Dead Man's Walk, Gus and Call are not yet 20, young men coming of age in the days when Texas was still an independent republic. Enlisting as Texas Rangers under a land pirate who wants to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans, Gus and Call experience their first great adventure in the barren great plains landscape, in which arbitrary violence is the rule -- whether from nature, or from the Indians whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico.<

True Grit

Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, sets out to avenge her Daddy who was shot to death by a no-good outlaw. Mattie convinces one-eyed "Rooster" Cogburn, the meanest U.S. marshal in the land, to ride along with her. In True Grit, we have a true American classic, as young Mattie, as vital as she is innocent, outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten men of the trail in a legend that will last through the ages.

Winchester 1886

On the American frontier, every gun tells a story. A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present, a brand new, lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of its big .50-caliber slugs, never makes it there. Instead, the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own - from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond.

Deer Run Trail

The year was 1881, an' young Ruben Beeler was makin' his way along near the Missouri River, findin' work when he could an' livin' the only life he knew. When he come on ol' Arliss Hyatt, beat to hell an' near shot to death, Rube done what he could for him. He didn't know that act of kindness was gonna wind up changin' his whole life, but it did.

Audible Editor Reviews

Stoic cowboys, villainous gamblers, and kindhearted damsels are some of the Wild West archetypes that originated in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, which has been adapted into TV and film by several directors, including Cecil B. DeMille.

The Virginian is a lanky cowboy working at a ranch in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Throughout the story he clashes with the crooked Trampas and romances a lovely schoolteacher, Molly Stark Wood. Wister’s story depicts the harshness of the western frontier in elegant, slightly formal language.

Jack Garrett does justice to the book’s Wild West setting with his gravelly drawl and a range of character voices.

Publisher's Summary

Originally published in 1902, Owen Wister’s The Virginian pre-dates the classic novels of Zane Grey and Max Brand and is considered by many to be the original Western. Dedicated to Wister’s friend and fellow outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt, this timeless tale almost single-handedly established the cowboy archetype in literature. A quiet, noble foreman of a Wyoming cattle ranch in the 1870s, the Virginian falls for pretty schoolteacher Molly Wood. But when a rival suitor challenges his honor, the Virginian struggles to make his beloved Molly understand the harsh justice of the West.

A dear friend recommended that I listen to this book. She said that a professor of American literature, when asked what one book, written by a North American author, would he recommend reading above all others, said, "The Virginian." I was amazed. I would have bet on Mark Twain or Poe or Faulkner. My recollection of The Virginian was of a TV series in the 1960s. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a pleasure and delight all the way through. Why is Owen Wister not more well known than Mark Twain? Twain's "Roughing It" is one of my favorite novels of the west but "The Virginian" so outshines Twain in sheer storytelling that it makes the old master look like a copycat. This is not your dime-store, two-dimensional shoot-em-up western. Beautifully written, characters that lift off the page, a well told engrossing story, AND great literature to boot. Mark Twain move over.

<br/>A Powerful romance. <br/><br/>A lot is lost in understanding due to the culture shift of language and understanding of how people spoke at this time (1902) and just understanding every day environment of horses, ranches, terms of the day.<br/><br/>My grandfather lived 1884 to 1984 and spoke the same way. I watch "The Virginian" TV shows with my grandfather & family... Picked this book up quite randomly... Such a gem of a book.<br/><br/>I also highly recommend the following books:<br/>Lonesome Dove<br/>Old Yeller - YOu'll cry when your read this one....<br/>Shane <br/><br/>Note: Shane and Old Yeller are great for younger readers in that they are short books.<br/>

This is actually a boo that's assigned for Wyoming history in school! I did not have time for turning pages as I am a full time employee and a father of 3... I truly enjoyed this book, I listened to it in 24 hrs! if you are into the old West, this book is for you!

I enjoyed this book so much, I listened to it twice, with just one book in between. The prose was wonderful, and the listener is drawn so completely into the story that it's very hard to put it down. It's not an action-packed Western, but it is a beautiful love story that takes place in the late 1880's when the West was still pretty lawless. I highly recommend this book.

I've been listening to some classics interspersed with other books recently. This one was available at a special low price so I picked it up. Boy, have I been surprised! It has a good story and the narration is one of the best I've heard.